Note that it is a bad idea to run spelling tests during an ordinary CPAN distribution install, or in a package that will run in an uncontrolled environment. There is no way of predicting whether the word list or spellcheck program used will give the same results. You can include the test in your distribution, but be sure to run it only for authors of the module by guarding it in a skip_all unless -d 'inc/.author' clause, or by putting the test in your distribution's xt/ directory. Anyway, people installing your module really do not need to run such tests, as it is unlikely that the documentation will acquire typos while in transit. :-)

You can add your own stop words, which are words that should be ignored by the spell check, like so:

add_stopwords(qw(asdf thiswordiscorrect));

Adding stop words in this fashion affects all files checked for the remainder of the test script. See Pod::Spell (which this module is built upon) for a variety of ways to add per-file stop words to each .pm file.

If you have a lot of stop words, it's useful to put them in your test file's DATA section like so:

To maintain backwards compatibility, comment markers and some whitespace are ignored. In the near future, the preprocessing we do on the arguments to add_stopwords will be changed and documented properly.

Checks all the files for POD spelling. It gathers all_pod_files() on each file/directory, and declares a "plan" in Test::More for you (one test for each file), so you must not call plan yourself.

If @files is empty, the function finds all POD files in the blib directory if it exists, or the lib directory if it does not. A POD file is one that ends with .pod, .pl, .plx, or .pm; or any file where the first line looks like a perl shebang line.

Returns a list of all the Perl files in each directory and its subdirectories, recursively. If no directories are passed, it defaults to blib if blib exists, or else lib if not. Skips any files in CVS or .svn directories.

A Perl file is:

Any file that ends in .PL, .pl, .plx, .pm, .pod or .t.

Any file that has a first line with a shebang and "perl" on it.

Furthermore, files for which the filter set by "set_pod_file_filter" return false are skipped. By default, this filter passes everything through.

The order of the files returned is machine-dependent. If you want them sorted, you'll have to sort them yourself.

Add words that should be skipped by the spellcheck. Note that Pod::Spell already skips words believed to be code, such as everything in verbatim (indented) blocks and code marked up with ..., as well as some common Perl jargon.

has_working_spellchecker will return undef if there is no working spellchecker, or a true value (the spellchecker command itself) if there is. The module performs a dry-run to determine whether any of the spellcheckers it can will use work on the current system. You can use this to skip tests if there is no spellchecker. Note that "all_pod_files_spelling_ok" will do this for you.

If you want to force this module to use a particular spellchecker, then you can specify which one with set_spell_cmd. This is useful to ensure a more consistent lexicon between developers, or if you have an unusual environment. Any command that takes text from standard input and prints a list of misspelled words, one per line, to standard output will do.

If your project has POD documents written in languages other than English, then obviously you don't want to be running a spellchecker on every Perl file. set_pod_file_filter lets you filter out files returned from "all_pod_files" (and hence, the documents tested by "all_pod_files_spelling_ok").

By default Pod::Spell is used to generate text suitable for spellchecking from the input POD. If you want to use a different parser, perhaps a customized subclass of Pod::Spell, call set_pod_parser with an object that is-a Pod::Parser.